Blowjob Parties: Pro or Con?

Crashing Director Jason Freeland's Garden Party

Even though for some weird reason Garden Party's being marketed all over MySpace as a teen drama, à la Swimfan or Cruel Intentions, writer/director Jason Freeland's foray into the dirty underpinnings of Los Angeles, is, in fact, a quirky indie flick about the morally ambiguous reality of chasing the Hollywood dream.

At the film's core are three people: Sally St. Clair (Vinessa Shaw), a bitchy, weed-dealing real estate agent; April (Willa Holland, better known as Marissa's little sis from The O.C.), a teenager willing to do the dirty for money in order to get herself away from her drunken, pervy stepfather; and Sammy (Erik Smith), a teen hustler/musician whose baby-faced good looks disguise a calculating opportunist.

To be perfectly honest, when I left the theater, I wasn't even sure if I liked Garden Party: I thought maybe I had missed the point somehow. It definitely had some funny moments (OH MY GOD that Sammy kid's music was brutally emo), but I had a difficult time giving a shit about the movie's self-involved, self-serving characters.

In a phone interview with writer/director Freeland, I asked him about the tit-for-tat attitude his characters all seemed to share, particularly in regards to getting something (money, fame) for what they seemed to perceive as nothing (sex, mostly).

Freeland told me he "was interested in exploring the issue of how kids today seem to be losing the value and meaning of sex. In a world with oral sex parties, friends with benefits, and an 'I'll trade you sex for, like, a haircut or whatever' mentality, what value could it possibly have?" And I agreed with him, mostly because I saw a Law & Order episode about blowjob parties once, so I knew he must be right.

I told him about my difficulty in forming an opinion about the movie. "I remember when I came out of Mann's Chinese after seeing Goodfellas and I felt like that," he said. "I was almost glad it was something I had to digest and mull over for a while."

And maybe that was the point. Maybe I wasn't able to make a clear decisive judgment about it because the movie wasn't giving me any clear decisive answers. You mean—GASP!—I had to make a decision on my own without any help from a weepy soundtrack or a montage?! What the hell, movie? And that's when I realized I'd been thinking about Garden Party every day for a week. And any movie that can make me do that deserves an endorsement. Cue weepy soundtrack.